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More than half of IT security decision-makers surveyed by Enterprise Strategy Group said it's harder to defend systems from security lapses by insiders than it was in 2011. "One of the big revelations in the survey is that 73% of respondents said they don't block privileged users from access to sensitive data," said Allan Kessler, CEO of Vormetric, which commissioned the study. "... The fundamental problem is that the folks that have access to manage an internal system have incredible amounts of privileges. ... Very few organizations realize that they can keep privileged users from seeing data and still allow them to do their job."

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In a 451 Research report published in conjunction with Vormetric, 90% of 1,100 senior security executives worldwide said their organizations were susceptible to cyberthreats, while 61% said their organizations had experienced a data breach in the past, with almost 1 in 5 suffering a breach last year. Budgets and skill shortages were cited as the biggest obstacles to better data security.

Health care organizations that were once driven by the need to comply with regulations to establish strong data protections are now motivated by a different factor -- the desire to avoid the fallout from a data breach. In a poll of 920 IT professionals commissioned by Vormetric, nearly two-thirds of respondents said their organizations will boost security spending this year, with compliance ranking second as an additional investment behind breach prevention.

Google's mobile Android platform is not brimming with undetected malware, according to the expert in charge of protecting it. Adrian Ludwig, Android Security chief, says the operating system's many layers of verification prevent all but a tiny fraction of malicious applications from getting to users, and he adds that erecting too rigid a barrier could stifle innovation and growth.

Hackers are using employees such as IT and security staff, as well as C-level executives, to infiltrate banks, according to an Enterprise Strategy Group survey. Of the data security executives polled, 54% say the insider threat is tougher to deal with than two years ago and "they feel more vulnerable because the threats are more sophisticated," says Tina Stewart of Vormetric, the security software company that sponsored the study.